


Down in Threes

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Gosford Park (2001)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-19
Updated: 2007-12-19
Packaged: 2018-01-25 01:38:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1624691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mary Maceachran does not regret her history with Robert Parks. [WWII fic, Mary/Robert.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Down in Threes

**Author's Note:**

> As it turns out, it was nearly six hours of self-inflicted Clive Owens. The horror. ;) Thanks and my first unborn child to Tyries for the beta ( <3). Remaining Stupid American fubars are my fault entirely.
> 
> Written for LJC

 

 

~~~

**I. The Explanation**

1938 was in many ways the best year of Mary's life.

Not to say that it contained the best day (that was another seven years coming, and a triplicate thing at that), or even the best straight run of days. What it was by comparison was the best time of security for her, and her best year as a Lady's Maid, sure of herself at last. She became finally confident in her abilities that year, fully familiar with the staff of Her Ladyship's house, respected and liked, prepared for nearly anything. By no means had she become the most talented hairdresser or cook or even seamstress in the English countryside (she's come to realize that this only happens in books, of which she's read a surprising many since becoming a Lady's Maid), but neither was she dissatisfactory; she was good _enough_. Mary was content to live with that.

Her one sorrow then (and to a certain extent this day) lay in her failure to become as much the conversationalist as she would have liked; she could commune very amicably with the staff, and mixed well with most types, but she was never particularly _witty_ , and all her cleverness seemed to lay between her ears rather than in her speech. She had always watched those tremendously loquacious giants of gossip and intelligence with which her Lady rubbed elbows in a kind of captivated silence, in envy of their charm. Even now she thinks sometimes that she wouldn't mind trading a piece of her more intuitive logicality for one of those magnificent tongues, but cannot quite keep her mother out of her head whenever such ideas come to her, and never actually pursues them.

Mary also had a moment of startling clarity in this year, changing in the room she kept alone and catching sight of herself one abrupt second in the Spartan washstand mirror as she stripped. Standing in her shift and blinking at her figure, she took note for perhaps the very first time of what blinked back, face-to-face.

She'd never much been in the habit of looking at her reflection before this point, and so only realized then, with a small kind of wonder, that she was not as attractive as she once had been. Certainly she was pleasing enough, having retained both her figure and hair, and her twenty-six years had given at last her mother's thoughtful resting expression to her mouth, and her overall character a sort of handsomeness, but the youthful quality of her cheeks was gone, her skin no longer as soft or colorful as it had once been. Her hands she had long given up on, and long been prepared to lose; but it was undeniably strange to realize then that she was no longer a young woman, rather now a woman in full, and one rapidly tearing through her prime.

She was not terribly disturbed by this reflection; Mary had never been the particularly vain sort, and hated to support the quality in herself when she did encounter it: but looking in such a way made her think of other things of a more startling character--that is, those things having to do _with_ character.

Mary did not at the time think she had changed much, until that strange shifting instant. Looking back on this, she finds she cannot exactly say why--just knows that in that moment, she had carried on without much thought to her own betterments and alterations; only interested in her failures, and the correction of these. She supposes this simply went to show how focused she was on her work then, and how desperately she was still trying to emulate Mrs. Wilson.

She was no longer so nervous, and to this day that has held true; she does not stammer in uncertainty anymore, or walk with rabbit's feet. Her smile is calm and assured and occasionally silly and no longer used to cover her mistakes, quite simply because she has come finally to realize that there are few mistakes she can make that cannot be almost immediately corrected. She is not incautious, but she knows now what to do with her hands and face, and it gives her faith, for perhaps the first time, in her own judgments.

But this has been a very gradual thing for her, and in the year 1938, looking at her smooth face in that mirror and thinking of these things, she was quite overwhelmed. It was harder then than it is now, also, to look back to that faraway September to compare, to the shooting party and her own behavior thereat. She had trouble believing she'd ever been so scattered.

Yet she was once, and to this instant Mary has never forgotten that strange week. This isn't just because of the murder, either, or Robert, or her own sense of displacement and nervousness; it had _taught_ her indescribably of the world she was entering, questioned her commitment, her understanding, judged and demanded of her great depth of thought. Those circumstances had placed such people as Elsie and Dorothy and Mrs. Lewis beside one another for her and said, _watch: watch and understand, because someday this could be you_ , and made her ask herself at last in no uncertain terms what she _wanted_.

As a little girl she had wanted to be close to glamour, born partially from a very childish desire to capture just a piece of that glamour for herself; not unlike chasing fireflies for the sheer momentary pleasure of holding one to one's eyes and staring in bald fascination at its inexplicable glow. Her childhood had always seemed to her both unglamorous and dull--an important, well-loved period in her life, but nothing worth discussing, and not at all the kind of life a little girl should have led. She'd delighted extremely in escaping Glasgow to parts beyond, a constant source of terror for her parents before she finally calmed somewhat around eleven. Mary had not wanted to upset them, nor even to get into trouble, but she had always suffered rather conflicting desires, part of her wanting to be steady and cool like her father, the other part wanting only to see and learn. Her youngest days had simply been spent indulging the second desire more than the first.

When the first had finally taken greater precedence for her, she had come quickly to realize what a blessing it was in her pursuits that she actually _liked_ to help others, being that her only chance to touch any kind of glamour would rest in serving it. Working summers in her parent's tiny family shop, she had delighted in being useful, and had begun to nanny by the time she was sixteen. Sometimes she could see plainly how it bothered her mother to watch her follow in the footsteps--footsteps both of her parents had worked hard and long to cease copying--of her grandmother, a Lady's Maid in England in her own time, before a great number of their benefits had been guaranteed by the Crown; but she and her mother had never seen eye to eye on the matter. The elder had always hated England, while Mary had been fascinated by it.

At eighteen she began serving as a maid in a Glasgow inn at the start of 1930, a small affair of terrible inconsequence. She has no clear memory of this time now, a great number of the days blurred indistinguishably together in her mind, but she knows she worked there until the summer of 1932. A footman of Countess Trentham's happened upon the inn then, and after him the Countess herself, who had the footman bring Mary to her in the warm light of one early morning to hear her proposition of a job.

At the time Mary had truly believed that her offer to take her on without experience had been a great act of magnanimity, but she knows better now; out on an expedition of obligation in Scotland, her previous Lady's Maid just resigned, the noblewoman had been shopping for the cheapest deal, plain and simple. Mary has never been able to decide whether this offends her, unable to shake the feeling that it somehow should. She wonders if she would have still taken the offer, had she known.

She's learned a great deal since then, but even at twenty-six, having witnessed murder and adultery and a slow decline of the glamorous England she had come to such familiar terms with in her career, there was one thing she could not shake; that being the feeling that she had only made one true mistake in her life, and that that mistake was forever uncorrectable.

And when she feels very brave, she wonders whether Robert ever thinks of her the same way.

**II. The War**

Mary would be the first to admit how lucky she is to be in the service of such a distinguished woman, even if that woman is, on a good day, more precocious child than adult. It is luck and luck alone, she believes, that has carried her thus far, and a strong sense of forbearance; and she has always likewise known that having had such fortunes, her luck will have to eventually change. Or run out.

And it does, taking in the mid-spring of 1940 a significantly different turn from 1932's first, when at last she hands in her notice to Lady Trentham and expresses her interest in finding a new Lady.

It has taken her this long to become comfortable with how little respect she has for the Countess as a woman, and to decide that this is simply not enough for her. She wishes she could regret it more, but does not. They've both gotten what they wanted from one another. The noblewoman takes it quietly enough at first, even going so far as to offer an expression of feeble hope for her finding a satisfying match, but her words are insincere, and Mary doesn't think much of them. She doesn't think much of Lady Trentham at all now, except to presuppose the next thing she might take it upon herself to need.

She spends the next three months putting up with Her Ladyship's tempers at having to find a suitable new maid, all the while drawing as liberally as she feels she can on the moderate connections she's made over the last eight years, hoping for some news of an asking Lady; and finally there is one, a Baroness at present entrenched in London for the coming autumn's onset.

Mary sets out shortly thereafter for London itself, an interview planned and all her worldly possessions packed between two bags. She's uncomfortable having to carry her full earnings with her, but has gone to great lengths to conceal them, and can comfort herself with this knowledge.

Alternating rides hitched with delivery men and curious pedestrians on the motorways, she at last finds herself in the Borough of Haringey, and from there it isn't particularly difficult to find Highgate. Though sorely tempted to dawdle beside the river she can see shining in the distance of Haringey's eastern wards, she nevertheless restrains herself, and stops in a pub a mile short of her mark to find the time.

The pub is a small, quaint affair, and quite old, with a few high stained glass windows filtering murky blue and green light into the gloom of the chamber below. It is here, standing in a flood of shifting light from the open doorway with a suitcase to each hand, that she encounters the silence of June 18th. It is broken only by the radio and the voice of the new Prime Minister coming through, to which Mary listens with a bemused perplexity and growing fascination as she stares through the smoke curling up toward the ceiling of the pub at the grim-faced men below.

" _Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization_ ," the voice crackles, and then: " _Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us_."

And still, it takes her nearly five minutes, standing numb and unmoving on the threshold, to realize that they are truly at war now, and that she has just brought herself to the heart of it.

~

When asked later, Mary does not lie when she says she can't remember the Battle of Britain--but neither does she tell the truth, striking as happy a median as she can between the two instead.

She ends up taking a room briefly at the pub, having been turned away from her planned interview in light of the news. She holds out hope for the first week, sitting anxiously by the room's single window and preoccupying herself with her own books and the books of the staff as she watches for the promised runner; but no one comes, and it isn't until she's gone back to the compound and found it deserted that Mary realizes how naïve she has again been. Her patron has gone back to the country without (she presumes) any Lady's Maid at all. Mary is out of her picture.

She tries to find other work, but many of the great houses are going the same way, the Highgate ward soon half deserted and oddly quiet, the other half closed. For the first time it occurs to her how overqualified she has become after eight years of work for a Countess who never paid her enough, and that these nobles here hardly want to have to do better by her. It doesn't occur to her to lie about her experience until after her options have been exhausted.

For a while she thinks them miserably cowardly, until the first real blows hit London in September; living through her first carpet bombing, Mary almost instantly finds herself wishing she had thought to go home to Scotland while she still had the chance, and cannot resent them anymore. Instead her feeling resolves into a general sort of disgust for their own cowardice, and for the cowardice she herself carries.

She is spending her earnings too fast on the room, and in a more fortunate turn strikes a deal with the landlord; her room in return for maid's services. It's certainly not an ideal situation--in many ways she feels that she has been universally demoted--but she has a bed, and the pub is near a bomb shelter. She is not really _unhappy_ with the situation, too grateful to at last have work, but the general situation of the country depresses her tremendously. She's never liked to see anyone fight.

She thinks often of her first years of service now, and of the shooting party in particular. She can never really get it out of her mind, nor can she ever explain exactly _why_ to herself in any sort of satisfactory manner. As her clothes fall from their pristine state to something more realistic in the face of war, she thinks wistfully of the ladies in their flowing satin skirts and gowns, and bed warmers, and good soap always at hand, and has to laugh a little at these being the sorts of things she misses.

But then, she supposes she has always rather liked to have things just so as well, if only a little. Or perhaps it's just become a habit.

~

Mary Maceachran does not regret her history with Robert Parks.

She does not think of him now as something very like an idea as well as a man, and never has it crossed her mind a second time how much his final actions disturbed her (the kiss and the murder both).

Mary is not consumed with curiosity as to his whereabouts, and certainly never wrote to Lord Stockbridge's head maid while still in Countess Trentham's service to enquire after them; and because she did not write, she is not disappointed to learn that he is no longer in service there, having left the year before to find fortune in London. Mary does not wonder at any of this.

She did not look for work specifically within the borders of aforementioned city simply in the hope of one day running into him, nor has she ever, ever regretted hearing Elsie's casually murmured 'carpe diem' so many years ago.

Mary Maceachran does not think of Robert Parks at all, except on those rare occasions when she does.

~

Not that Mary would _mind_ thinking of Robert; apart from proving himself capable of murder (not one she can entirely fault, but murder all the same), he's a nice sort of fellow, one of the darkly intelligent type she's always found quite exciting and compelling. There was a reason, after all, that they'd gotten on so famously that week, and she would be the first to admit, if blushingly, that she'd thought--and still thinks--him rather fine.

Mary did not try to put him from her mind at first because she was shy to think of him (only a little), but more because she seemed prone to distraction when she did not. She once left an iron burn like an ugly black shoeprint on one of the Countess Trentham's nice shirts when she lost herself in a brown study of him, and had a portion of the cost removed promptly from her salary for her carelessness, a waste she will forever cringe looking back on.

It's gotten easier to think of with time, however, and stopped taking her attention from her duties some years prior; stopped even its awful habit of painting her face an embarrassed red when she thought of how he'd kissed her, and how she had never--even once--noticed that he wanted to before it had happened.

She doesn't regret leaving, though. What she regrets are the lost opportunities to talk and better understand what had happened, and this only later in her life; she was so focused the year or two following on her own household, she could spare little time for such focused regret, settling for a more general, all-encompassing kind instead.

Sometimes she thinks that she would have liked to kiss him back, though.

~

Mary does not enjoy particularly working at the inn, and enjoys even less being in the dead, depressing Highgate ward after so much of the pomp has gone. She contents herself in her hours off by walking through the other wards instead, working her way slowly and carefully through the strange geography of Haringey, pockmarked now by bomb damage; here the burned out frame of a church, elsewhere a row of once-neat houses, now completely demolished.

She finds her way to the banks of the River Lea by her second week of walking, and is charmed by it more than all the parks and woods combined. Living near the ocean, she has always had something of an affinity for water, and it becomes a habit after she has found a good number of the river's bridges to walk along it on those mornings she can spare. It lifts her spirits to be near the glimmer of the water, and on the flattish land surrounding it.

It comes to her attention as she takes these walks that a great number of the Eastern wards are crushingly destitute; she thinks this must have been the case even before the war, though that in and of itself has been no help. After she has fixed her habit of walking the Lea, she begins to form a new habit of walking the neighborhoods themselves in search of places to lend her hands, finding an inexplicable pleasure in aiding the local folk, who always smile at her in the most amazingly grateful way when she does a good job.

She stumbles across the Seven Sisters ward a month after coming to London, and is drawn in by its quiet in the early morning, and the vast swaths of scorched and damaged earth and wood there. It looks badly maintained even for the the war, everywhere lying almost untouched debris, and the shattered remains of fallen interior plumbing cracked not by the fires, ironically enough, but by children she has begun to realize are always about, scavenging the newly destroyed houses for small treasures and taking advantage of the many ripe opportunities for random destruction.

It is on her second day exploring this ward that Mary stops in the ruins of one such house to stare at the river, hoping that the sirens will not go off during such a peaceful moment of reflection. This section of the ward is, as far as she's been able to see, completely abandoned, and she likes very much the silence but for the lapping, and the breeze.

It is not until she turns that she realizes she is not alone, having been joined at some point by a small girl who is staring at her with open curiosity, raking her eyes over her black dress and worn black coat and straight hair.

"Are you lost?" the little girl says, large blue eyes demandingly inquisitive, if slightly nervous; she is obviously not quite comfortable addressing adults directly yet. Her dress is very dirty, covered by a black coat which can, like Mary's, hide its own load of dirt through the good fortune of its color, if not a number of small tears.

"No, thank ye," Mary answers, casting an eye around for the girl's mother. She cannot find anyone, and fixes her attention eventually back on the child. "Where's your mother, miss?"

"Well, I haven't got one of _them_ ," the girl says rather precociously, folding thin arms around her waist. "I live at the orphanage."

It has long perplexed Mary that she cannot hear the word _orphanage_ without thinking of Robert anymore, though she knows perfectly well the one in which he was raised is in the next borough over, Islington. She feels the same startled thrill all the same, and before she quite knows what she is asking, says, "What orphanage is that?"

"The Seven Sister's," her confidante replies promptly. "Dolores Wilde is the headmistress. We've only got one nurse, though, and cook's sick since last Tuesday."

"Oh, I'm sorry," Mary murmurs, and really is. Then, before she quite knows what she's asking, but feeling already in her gut that she is about to take another of those leaps of circumstance and happen upon something life-changing, she says, "Would you mind showing me the place?"

For a moment the child hesitates. She seems uncertain, weighing the reasons Mary could want to see where she lives against the reasons for refusing the request; and then she abruptly shrugs and turns on her heel, leading Mary back through the rubble to the promised building.

It is, surprisingly, a moderately sized institution, and though she can see that it was never in the best repair before, the staff has obviously gone to some effort to maintain appearances now. The saddest thing about it is the wide expanse of wild terrain that was once a garden which constitutes its front yard, the borders of the once delineated beds now overrun with weeds; only the trees are majestic, a grand collection of pale ash with a great deal of growth, several half-swarmed by children at play who stare baldly at them (and in particular Mary) when the girl leads her through.

Mary without hesitation finds and speaks at length with Dolores Wilde, a woman two years her senior with a remarkably fierce resting expression. She is at first unfriendly, looking at Mary suspiciously, confused as to why she is there at all, but she thaws when she recounts her troubles, explaining her current situation quickly and plainly, and they share one of the last cups of tea either of them will have for a while as the conversation grows more comfortable.

The orphanage supports twenty-three children and, as Mary comes to find quickly enough, is tremendously short-handed. It's odd, for while Mary does not quite think working there is what she had in mind over working at the pub, it is nevertheless where she immediately goes as soon as she has threshed out with Dolores that she can work for a room instead of a salary, and has resigned from her identical deal in Highgate. Her years as a nanny recommend her well, and she has always liked children. She gets the overwhelming feeling, furthermore, that this is exactly what she's supposed to be doing.

"Of course you're more than welcome if you're willing to work for free," Dolores says briskly over the tea, looking piercingly at her and pursing her lips, something Mary is sure will turn out to be a habit. "The children need more time with an adult supervising them, and our poor cook is flooded to the gills with work. I just can't imagine--I mean, are you _really_ a Lady's Maid?"

"Not today, mum," Mary answers, smiling, and raises her cup in a simple, gregarious toast to her newest employer.

~

It is one of the greatest joys of her life to work at the orphanage.

Just not at first. At first it is simply passable, the kind of job she can lose herself in without much thought. The children don't like her much to start, particularly because of how young she looks, taking it as an affront that she would actually dare to order them around. The boys make their feelings known when she goes to her chamber one evening to sleep and finds a heap of dead leaves in the rough shape of a body beneath the top sheet of her bed. It gave her a terrible fright when she walked in, thinking someone else was actually sleeping in the room, and is no less irritating even after she's realized what the shape really is.

She supposes it's not very mature to return their antics in kind, scattering handfuls of cold, inedible old noodles from the kitchen beneath the covers at the feet of their own bed (just so they won't realize what's there until they've already crawled in), but she earns their grudging respect with the maneuver, and after a full year their total regard. It helps that she'll actually let them play in the remains of the houses without yelling at them so long as they allow her to chaperone, and that she is, as they put it, "So grand to listen to."

The young girls are easy enough, the elders somewhat more difficult; but for them it's stories of service to a Countess, and the vast numbers of noble parties she can describe, that are most fascinating.

Mary will, furthermore, actually tell them stories, something their other nannies had apparently refused to do. They claim her stories are better than any they've had anyway because they are from Scotland, and not at all the sorts of yarns they've already been spun; she speaks of the Fae Royal Court and child snatching, and then of the Aes Sidhe in the hills when that pleases them; then of the Kelpie in streams and rivers, and the Each Uisge in the Lochs, every one waiting to drag unsuspecting persons to their deaths beneath the waters. The children shriek in terrified delight when she speaks of how the Each Uisge will devour the drowned victim, leaving only his or her liver to signify the death.

It is much more satisfying for Mary personally to be here instead of the pub, if only because here she actually feels useful. She would be lying if she claimed to be working only in her own interests, thinking almost all the time of Robert, and of the little boys in the orphanage here, hoping that she is in some way improving their lives so that they will never have to feel as bitter about anything as he grew to feel. She doubts sometimes that she's actually having an effect, the plain fact being that all of these children are without family in a country where family is very nearly everything. The girls in particular are practically unmarriageable, bringing no prospects at all to a potential union.

Sometimes she cannot help but hate England for that alone, even if it does feel unbearably treasonous to think so. They may well be at war, but these children have been maintaining their own campaigns since--more often than not--the very days of their birth, and are more soldierly than any militia she has ever encountered.

**III. The Best Days**

The best day of Mary's life is a triplicate thing not because it can be divided into three sections, but because it is actually a conglomeration of three days together, all tied to one another by the same broad theme; and this theme is Robert himself, and those days are days on which she had the good fortune to encounter him.

The first fell at the shooting party, the day before that of the murder, when they had just reached their most familiar point. Robert had taken a spot in the ironing room to smoke in privacy as they conversed between duties, avoiding the bustling kitchen maids as they dealt furiously with the food of the Almighty. They had held a perfectly fluid, marvelous sort of dialogue there, with comfortable pauses and brilliant, sharp flashes of humor that stitched her sides, and saddened her when she thought of how briefly they would know one another. He had escorted her back to her room afterwards, a perfect gentleman, and she had not seen him again until the next morning.

The next fell after the shooting party incident by three years, at another, more harried gathering in the country; this time on an afternoon excursion to London, the Countess there to browse and luncheon, Mary there to attend her. Standing the whole time in wait at Her Ladyship's shoulder, she remembers vividly how, as they passed down one fine walkway, her eyes had traveled up through the crowd and found in the distance the lofty head of Lord Stockbridge himself, and drifted behind him to the dark face of Robert Parks, who was looking right at her.

There was a kind of electricity that went through her upon seeing him, one part of her thinking of the murder and another thinking of the kiss and another thinking of the conversation amongst the washing things, and she found herself regretting quite bitterly later that day in the car home how they had not managed to talk at all, forced to pass wordlessly by one another as their respective charges hurried on to their opposing destinations with hardly a nod of recognition.

The third is the most profound, hardest of all to believe, and also the best. The single disappointing thing about it is that it has not yet happened.

~

Mary is out in the garden courtyard washing laundry in the spring of 1942, listening to the ash rustling around her in a wet, vaguely chilly breeze, when she looks up from the rusting bucket and children's under things to see, of all the things in the world she could see, Mrs. Croft outside the yard wall. Freezing mid-scrub, Mary realizes that the older woman is looking at her in equal wonder, and almost laughs at the coincidence.

"I was just going by Islington," she says later, after Mary has admitted her to the yard and said her own shocked greetings.

"But--" Mary says helplessly, taking in her casual dress and the severe, deepened lines of her face: "But what of Lady Sylvia?"

"I was sacked four years ago, girl," Mrs. Croft snorts, and begins to grasp unabashedly in her pocket for a cigarette. "We never did get on. I work elsewhere now, and believe you in me, I'm happier." She looks at Mary keenly then, sizing her up over the cigarette as she lights it. Mary, for her part, is at a loss for words, instinctively wanting to apologize, but unable to bring herself to do so when Mrs. Croft has just expressed her satisfaction with the deal.

"My sister," Mrs. Croft goes on, still fixing her with that severe eye, "says you worked out her history? Learned of her boy?"

Instantly ashamed of her meddling, despite the fact that she never has been before this moment (Mrs. Croft has not lost her knack for this, it seems), Mary can only nod.

"Mm," the elderly woman intones; that scratchy noise Mary got so used to hearing stand in for a proper response, though it was only very rarely cast in her direction. She looks assured now, resolved. "Then I shan't be shy with you."

"Shy, mum?"

"Regarding the boy. I suppose you've not had any sort of word?"

Mary's feels a terrible sinking sensation drop right through the pit of her stomach, her damp hands chilled beyond the point of feeling in this weather. She doesn't want to ask, but cannot keep herself from doing so: "Word of what?"

Mrs. Croft looks abruptly impatient with her questions, saying briskly, "Of the _boy_ , Robert. He's in service now, up in the heart of things I hear."

It's like unexpectedly ducking her head in the wash water, only a thousand times worse. Mary finds herself incapable of thinking beyond this horror, only able to say at last, very faintly, "I didn't know," and then to ask, even more faintly: "Was he drafted?"

"Lord no," the cook scoffs, eyebrows turned up incredulously at the very thought. "Not that one. The stubborn man went in all of his own power, believe you in me: the crown never has to draft mules such as them. Thinks he's master of his own fate just for signing a piece of parchment and putting on the dress willingly. He'll have had more than his fill by the time he's returned, mark my words."

Mary cannot think of anything to say.

She reflects on it later, after Mrs. Croft has gone on to Islington, and she's again safe in her own room for the night. Forcing herself to not think of it before this point had nearly destroyed her day, making her absentminded helping the cook, absentminded dressing the children for bed, and far too absentminded to tell a proper story. It's a disappointment to them, but she knows they'll eventually forgive her.

Mary doesn't know why she never thought of it as a possibility. Almost all the men of conscription age are gone, nobles and commoners for the most part alike; and thinking of it, she can just see him striding without hesitance through the sign up. He'd never been particularly military minded, but Mary does not doubt that it's just as Mrs. Croft says, him trying to preemptively makes his own decisions regarding his service.

It still makes her feel terribly bitter for never having considered, and this is the first night since her arrival she's spent sniffling miserably into her pillow, scared for him and angry at herself, and uncertain of quite what she ought to do anymore. She cannot imagine what it would feel like to hear that he'd died.

~

Mary had always thought that in war life would be in some way totally arrested; that it would be impossible to do even the most ordinary things because...because it was war, and war was all-encompassing. It is a most ignorant way of perceiving things, but all she is capable of conjuring without some prior experience.

She learns quickly enough how much this is not the case, and surprises herself with how rapidly she is able to grow used to ducking into the orphanage's worn bomb shelter, and eating on scant rations of the same tired foods, and scavenging the communal clothes tents for children's garments. It is true that doing some things normally--leaving London, for instance, or after a while even sending out the post--has become impossible, but it is something she finds quickly in herself, this will to soldier on.

It helps too to have the children, who simply cannot take the war to the same serious extent as the adults surrounding them; they, after all, have no family fighting in distant places, and soon enough no school to visit; and though she is at first horrified when they bring trinkets for her from one of the first burned-out houses presenting its sad, black charcoal face to the world, she soon comes to find as much excitement in it as them. Never once does she _not_ take the war seriously, but they keep her from becoming too awfully black about it; and she never regrets getting out of bed for them.

She only wishes she could stop thinking of Robert being out there, and the _Stuka_ planes of the Luftwaffe which only come infrequently now; and in her mind as she sleeps she is plagued by silent companies of men marching out beyond in the snow without enough food, rubbing themselves in the chill as they suffer through terrible dark chasms of silence within their own minds. They are awful, unforgiving dreams, in the face of which all speech seems to lose meaning, and she can only think of the dark, and the inefficiency of language in communicating true despair.

~

Mary has never quite been able to imagine the war ending; she knows of course that it has to eventually, and envisions often that fond someday after its conclusion when everything will again be good, but the actual _end of the war_ has never really crossed her mind. She is too busy surviving it _now_ , and helping the children to survive it _now_ , to spare much thought for its eventual closing act.

When it begins to wind down in 1944 she feels a strange, painful flash of hope at the thought of being able to walk outside again without worry, and of jam, and tea, and sugar. She hadn't quite realized how much she's missed the normalcy of the days before, and ends up sniffling a bit embarrassingly in Dolores's room one night as they huddle by the radio, listening to some of the first positive news they've had in years.

By the new year of 1945 the whole atmosphere of the country has changed. Mary feels oddly like she does when she is about to finish a book or reach the end of an argument, a steady, mounting surge of adrenaline, only this particular rush is less concentrated, sustained over a series of weeks and months instead. It finally comes to a head on May 8th, when at last they announce over the radio, to the irrepressible, overwhelming joy of the nation, the unconditional surrender of the Germans, and knows that soon she'll be able to leave London.

The celebration for her, however, is only bittersweet; because she still does not know where exactly she wants to go after, and has had no news at all of Robert.

~

Mary works at the orphanage as long after the war's end as she feels needed. Many of the children are five full years older by the time she looks around two months later and at last sees everything in moderate order, the community coming to its feet again, slowly and painfully; and though their numbers have swelled alarmingly since Mary began working there, she is nevertheless confident that Dolores and the older children can endure without her, and says as much to the woman as she verbally gives her notice.

It is nighttime, and outside the tiny office it is raining softly, a sympathetic June storm. She listens to it hissing gently in the dark beyond as it strikes the roads and remaining houses and household remains, and thinks wistfully of the massive numbers of soldiers being decommissioned at this very moment.

"I am awfully sorry we can't give you any pay, love," Dolores says wetly, embracing her, and dampens somewhat the shoulder of Mary's dress in doing so. Mary has to smile, if only because she hadn't even thought it. They've become quite close over the last five years, despite Dolores's original dour countenance, and she's as sad to be going as the older woman is watching her.

"Of course not," she agrees firmly, "and I wouldn't have it anyway. I'm quite fine at the moment, Dolly."

Dolores tries to inauspiciously wipe at her eyes then, which Mary puts an end to at once by dangling her handkerchief before her face and encouraging her to take it, one of the few remaining relics from her days with Countess Trentham. On reflection it feels almost like a century since she was out of this city, at that noble house in the hills. She misses the moors with increasing intensity now, in a way she has not since she first left them.

"So," Dolores says in some semblance of a collected tone after mopping at her face liberally with the kerchief. "Whatever shall you do now, Mary?"

She does not have to think to answer. It is a question she's been asked three times since the end of the war by various well-meaning people, and only now has she realized what the correct response is, and has always been.

~

On the 23rd of June, 1945, Mary Maceachran walks to the market in Haringey and sells her second suitcase, the scorched gold necklace that the children first brought her from the equally scorched carcass of a dead woman's house, and what clothes she feels she can spare. With her remaining suitcase in hand she then walks the long walk to Camden, and the King's Cross Station, and with the money purchases those things necessary for the long journey back to Glasgow.

She arrives at the station in the late evening, and by the time the sun is setting is making her way across the platform to the middlemost cars. A doorman tries to take her bag, but she deters him gamely by smiling her most pleasant, thankful smile, and politely makes to send him on his way.

"Are you quite certain, miss?" he enquires, looking somewhat offended by the idea that she might actually be.

Mary does not let go of the bag, showing her teeth instead in an outright grin. "I'm quite alright, thank ye," she says. "It's my only burden, and I hate to see it gone."

"Suit yourself," he relents, seeing finally that she will not and snorting--something like an affronted horse--as he helps her to clamber into the train. "But for God's sake, if you must sleep, tuck it beneath your feet; we've lost half a full dozen in this wretched time, and I'd hate to think yours stolen if it truly is all you've got."

"Me as well, sir," Mary agrees, and ducks inside before he can reply.

He was not unkind to her, but Mary has gotten worse and worse at suffering the attentions of those interested only in sheltering her because she is small and unthreatening, and she would like to find her seat and settle before it gets too awfully dark. She moves to do just this, walking the aisles of the train just as they begin to light them in short, flickering bursts that hiss somewhat alarmingly as they spring to life; dimly, as though the conductors are afraid of complaint by the passengers.

The train is full to the seams with disbanded soldiers in half and full dress, milling about the connecting doors in groups and jauntily raising their caps to her, winking, when she goes by. Seeing them, she thinks she might be uncomfortable, but surprisingly is not, and has no trouble smiling back.

She finds her place on the side of the train facing the station, in a long row of half empty double seats in the centermost car. The lighting in this car is strangely lower, and the soldiers more subdued, a great many leaning past the boundaries of their own seats to play cards with one another, the vast majority smoking steadily; but she is put at ease when a few smile at her politely, and warmly returns the expression.

She chooses the outermost seat, the one nearest the window (because this is the seat she always chose as a child, and the one she is determined to always prefer), and settles her bag immediately beneath the heels of her shoes upon settling. Beyond this she can find nothing pressing to do, and eventually relaxes into watching the platform below, where the people continue to move endlessly about in the dark.

Four thin young boys are standing to the side of the bustle flooding in and out through the station doors, huddled around a dust bin, the two tallest smoking in a very grave, purposeful manner. Mary contents herself with staring at the glowing orange embers of their cigarettes' tips shuttering in and out of view behind the milling bodies, and is reminded strongly of the flickering tails of film reels run past their conclusions. One of the boys loses his cap in a breeze, then his cigarette as he leans for the cap, and Mary is grinning before she quite knows it, thinking of the orphanage's children.

"I must say, I've begun to wonder a great deal about my luck," a voice intones over her shoulder, startling her viciously. "I believe I was meant to have gone out tomorrow, and yet here I am tonight. It rather makes one believe in Father Christmas."

Mary does not know how she knows that it will be Robert standing behind her, because his voice is pitched low and a piece deeper than it had been before, quite unrecognizable under the circumstances; but then she turns, and he _is_ there.

He also has got a cigarette in his mouth, his jacket open over his military dress, with a number of startling grey hairs in his hairline (she had not thought of him aging at all, though of course he must have, must in fact be nearly forty-four), and great deep shadows devouring the spaces beneath his eyes; she can see them even in the low light, and is quite stricken.

"But it's June," she says, startling herself. She sounds far more grounded than she feels, though there is an edge to her words, a note of breathlessness that seems to brace him.

Robert grins, showing a similar expression to the lopsided one she knew before; only this one it exhausted and missing something, as though a piece of it has been withheld in the war. She would not at all be surprised to learn that this is the case. "Well, that hardly means anything," he replies, reaching up to grasp the cigarette between the webbing of his trigger and middle fingers. "If he does exist, he would still be watching us right now."

"Then I suppose we'd best not say anything naughty," she giggles, just as though she's twenty again, and is for two seconds mortified at her own behavior before he too begins to laugh deep in his throat; a brief, thrilling sound.

"Of course," he agrees.

They stare at one another then for nearly a minute, and it is rather awkward; but Mary knows somehow that he is as incapable of stopping as she, wanting too badly to look over every inch of her, see how she's changed with the war and the shifting services and the ten years of howling, inexcusable distance. He is quite fit still for his age (of course he is, he's been in battle for five _years_ ), but she sees more grey in his hair now as she looks, and finds herself thinking that it lends him an odd sort of majesty.

"Hello, Mary," he starts over again at last, breaking the silence softly, and is suddenly beaming with delight and weariness, his eyes hooded in both defense and pleasure. The shadows beneath them fold with his smile, twin hollows in his face.

"Hello," she answers back softly. "You look quite tired, Robert."

This is the third best day of her life.

**End**

 


End file.
